Category Archives: PHP

Jon noticed that PHP is 10 years old today! I’ve been working with PHP for the last 6 or so years.. has it been that long?

Ooh nice. Monte Ohrt wrote a guestbook as a demonstration of how to use Smarty to seperate presentation and code.
It’s well laid out and described in detail. If you’ve wondered what this Smarty thing is take a look at this and read through it a few times.
Later… PHP Guru has a guide to setting up an application’s structure which is worth a look!
My Top Two PHP Security Practices (via phpcomplete)
Synamic Typing (via PHP Everywhere)
lighttpd – lighttpd a secure, fast, compliant and very flexible web-server which has been optimized for high-performance environments. It has a very low memory footprint compared to other webservers and takes care of cpu-load. Its advanced feature-set (FastCGI, CGI, Auth, Output-Compression, URL-Rewriting and many more) make lighttpd the perfect webserver-software for every server that is suffering load problems. (via michel_v on IRC)

Now that XMLHTTPRequest has been renamed Ajax by Joe Public, it’s gaining more and more attention.
SAJAX is another toolkit, along the same lines as JPSpan in that you can call PHP functions directly from your web browser. The latest release also has backends for Perl and Python. Other language backends are a possibility if they’re contributed.
One major drawback of this project in it’s current state is, “Lack of type checking and support for rich return types”. JPSpan allows complex data types such as arrays to be passed back and forth between Javascript and PHP and from what I can see of the examples, SAJAX doesn’t support asynchronous calls either, yet.

multiplication example

/* PHP */
function multiply($x, $y) {
  return $x * $y;
}

/* JAVASCRIPT */
function do_multiply() {
  // get the folder name
  var x, y;

  x = document.getElementById("x").value;
  y = document.getElementById("y").value;
  x_multiply(x, y, do_multiply_cb);
}

The 80/20 Rule for Web Application Security

The quest for developing perfectly secure code is a noble pursuit. Let the heavens smile down if anyone is actually successful at the endeavor.

Conflict PHP is an opinion piece on the state of PHP. PHP5 (which I haven’t tried yet) is going down the road of Java and copying it’s object model and other ideas.
That’s no bad thing but most PHP developers surveyed don’t want that.
Adoption of PHP4 was much faster than PHP5 is, possibly because there was such a huge difference between versions 3 and 4. If PHP5 features were really “must haves” then people would be crying out for them. Zend is getting more “corporate” and I hope it doesn’t backfire on them!
John Lim has more on the issue.

It’s a common task but one that I haven’t looked at in as much detail as this devshed article. There’s a few bugs in the code, and a function was posted to the comments that’s all over the place.. here’s the same PHP function, cleaned up, to verify an email address. Note that it won’t work in Windows as-is because “checkdnsrr()” isn’t available on Windows platforms. (Remove the \ characters from before the ” characters surrounding the regex.. WordPress adds them when I post this. *grrr*)

function checkEmail($email)
{
  // checks proper syntax
  if( !preg_match( "/^([a-zA-Z0-9])+([a-zA-Z0-9\._-])*@([a-zA-Z0-9_-])+([a-zA-Z0-9\._-]+)+$/", $email))
  {
    return false;
  }

  // gets domain name
  list($username,$domain)=split('@',$email);
  // checks for if MX records in the DNS
  $mxhosts = array();
  if(!getmxrr($domain, $mxhosts))
  {
    // no mx records, ok to check domain
    if (!fsockopen($domain,25,$errno,$errstr,30))
    {
      return false;
    }
    else
    {
      return true;
    }
  }
  else
  {
    // mx records found
    foreach ($mxhosts as $host)
    {
      if (fsockopen($host,25,$errno,$errstr,30))
      {
        return true;
      }
    }
    return false;
  }
}